Founded in 1999, OutStart offers a portfolio of inter-related mobile, social, and learning Knowledge Solutions intended to accelerate and broaden access to colleagues and the knowledge they need to respond to business requirements more quickly and make better informed decisions.. I recently spoke with Mike Gregory about Participate, OutStart’s Social Business Software. It integrates social networking, collaboration, and knowledge sharing technologies in a secure managed environment. As a disclosure I am now working with OutStart on their social media efforts. Participate is one component of their offerings that also include mobile learning and communication, learning content management, and learning management system as well as a solution that pulls all the components together into a single integrated learning and knowledge suite.

Participate was acquired in 2004 and they continue to extend its features. Some of the capabilities within Participate include: workspaces, discovery and networking between members, blogs, micro-blogging, wikis, and an web-based interface to publish FAQs and contribute to communities. It integrates with Microsoft Office for the contribution of desktop content. There is also integration with systems such as SharePoint, MS Office Communication Server and CRM. Participate provides granular security and access control.

The micro-blogging feature allows for both manually generated updates such as provided through Twitter and auto-generated updates based on user activity.  You can add comments to the auto-generated updates. This latter feature can be a useful way to keep track of the pulse of the organization. It also reduces email traffic.

There is automated management and capturing of question and answer exchanges for organic growth of the knowledge base over time. If you do not know the right expert for your question, the system determines the most appropriate individuals. It reaches out to the experts through email and the response comes back into Participate.  Hee is a sample expertise exchange screen.

This is much more efficient than the old way of mass email blasts. Answers are then made available through search going forward. The capturing is nice feature and reduces the burden on employees to contribute to the firm’s knowledge capital separate from their normal work efforts. That has always been an obstacle to the effectiveness of traditional knowledge management solutions.

Participate supports both internal and externally facing blogs. Inside the enterprise there can be a community blog, as well as individual blogs. Where needed workflow is available for content review before posting. You can vary the amount of control required. It is used for the Web facing OutStart Knowledge Solutions Blog. Here is a sample internal blog screen.

Team workspaces are available. You can assign tasks, add documents, and perform other projects functions. There are three levels of security: wide open, visible but approval required to join, and completely private requiring an invitation to join. Here is a sample workspaces screen.

You can subscribe to content through email in a regularly scheduled digest where you set the schedule. To fit people’s existing work patterns, email can also be used to send subscription digests, immediate notifications of people, groups, or conversations they are following, and tasks assigned through workspaces. Here is a sample subscriptions screen.

There is RSS capability for all content within Participate. This gives great flexibility to monitoring what is going on within the system. You can track the activity of everyone within the system and provide credit for their involvement. People can also rate contributions. Over half of the features are mobile enabled to provide quick access from anywhere through a mobile interface.

We can see from the feature set that Participate offers a comprehensive set of collaboration capabilities. It goes one step further. Through its integration with OutStart’s learning content management system, Participate can be used to support social learning. This social side of learning has been shown to significantly increase the engagement of in learning activities.  Participate can be the bridge between formal and informal learning.

OutStart has won a number of awards including being named a Visionary in the Gartner Corporate Learning Systems Magic Quadrant since 2004, Top Learning Portal by TrainingIndustry.com, and Best of Elearning! awards for their OutStart LCMS and Hot Lava Mobile. I will cover other components of their offerings in future posts.  The OutStart Knowledge Solutions Blog offers an exchange of ideas on how to better utilize technology to improve knowledge sharing.